Hinton Hunt

Deep breath. I haven't really been looking forward to this posting - I could easily get into a lot of trouble here. There's something oddly sacred about Hinton Hunt figures - open criticism could earn me a lot of hostility, or an excommunication - I might at the very least get my windows broken.

Yet this is the right time to talk about HH. Once I started putting together armies using Higgins as the principle maker, I had to source all the things which Higgins did not make, which at that time meant drummers, staff officers, highlanders, Portuguese and - well, cavalry, since Higgins had not started their cavalry yet. Hinton Hunt were an obvious supplier. They had a vast range, they were very highly regarded, and some of the figures were very attractive indeed.

Since then I have bought and fettled and painted and fought and sold a great many Hintons over some 30-odd years. I do not regard myself as an expert, but I am certainly well acquainted with them, and the pounds and the hours I have invested over this time must surely earn me the right to express myself honestly. So I shall attempt to be fair but realistic.

My problems almost certainly stem from the fact that, though 1973 does seem like the Dark Ages now, I suppose I was actually fairly late on the scene as an HH customer. Many of the moulds - especially rank and file of popular nations - were knackered by this time. Further, since no shops (at least no shops near me) stocked the things, you couldn't sift through a tray and choose good ones. This was mail order of an extremely risky nature - orders came back incomplete, or incorrect, they might be months late, quality control was negligible, and the castings and the flash content were often really poor. Also they were expensive. If I hadn't somehow felt it was a privelege to be dealing with them at all, I would have been sufficiently impressed by all this to have given up on them.

They were ground breakers in customer service. I once phoned up to ask about an order which was a month overdue, and was given a lecture about how busy they were. While on my way to a holiday in Austria (in 1974) I took advantage of a 2-hour delay before my connecting train to Dover left London and I dashed along to Camden Passage in order to genuflect at the Shrine. I was met at the door by a man with a bunch of keys, who asked me was I thinking of coming into the shop. I admitted that he had identified my purpose with breathtaking precision.

"Nah - sorry - I have to go out for a while - can you come back later?"

This was 11am on a Thursday, and I couldn't.

I once treated myself to some factory-painted general staff figures which were even dearer, took even longer to arrive and were so badly done that I still get angry when I think about them. I repainted them.

And yet - and yet....

I have seen some of the ex-Peter Gilder cavalry OPC figures which Clive has. Beautiful. Heavily tweaked (wire harness, sheet metal bases, flat wire sword blades, etc), individually animated and superbly painted, I can easily see why such things would inspire devotion. I can even see why they might now change hands for high prices, though some of the prices have become obscene rather than high, in my very humble opinion.

So I have some HHs in my armies - I very much like the OPC French general - I have a number of these - it is a simple, elegant, useful little figure. I have a unit of highlanders (though it does have Art Miniaturen command figures) which I like - they have been with me for a long time. I have a unit of Brunswick hussars - again OPC. I have a unit of Portuguese cacadores - they are OK - if I could get something better I would replace them, but they are fine for now; since I cannot get HH command figures, these cacadores are led by Kennington Rifles figures, which appeals to the inverted snob in me. I have HH eagle bearers in my Higgins French Guard units, though I have provided them with paper flags. One or two (dismountable) generals. That may be about it now.

I had a brigade of Portuguese infantry, but I replaced them. Broadly speaking, the infantry are a little small for me, and I do not care for their weasel faces or their awkward posture. As for the dismountable cavalry, I really do not like the stumpy little legs, so have gradually sold and replaced what I had. True enthusiasts distinguish between original HH and later, David Clayton reissues - I accept that this may be significant, but I am unmoved. Clayton owned the rights and was the licensed manufacturer, so I am not sure why his figures should be regarded as in any way inferior. I am sure someone will put me straight!

Righto - the shutters are in position.

Home Brewed Flags - Hesse Darmstadt

Here's another of my high-resolution flags - this one is for the Hesse Darmstadt Regiment Gross und Erbprinz. The regiment was pretty much destroyed at the Siege of Badajoz (1812) - both battalions in Spain carried a flag, and they both looked like this.

Les Higgins

When I first saw Higgins figures, I was – as you might say – smitten. They were not like other figures I had seen, they were beautifully sculpted, with correct human proportions, they had a simple elegance and they were very cleanly cast. I don’t know why they looked so crisp – did they use different alloys? I do know that the firm had a background of casting figures for sporting trophies and so on, and you can sort of see it in the soldiers, with the smooth finish and the rather stylised poses.

Now I have to make it clear that this post also includes the Napoleonic products of Phoenix Model Developments (PMD), which the firm morphed into after Higgins himself died. A proper history of the company can be gained from VINTAGE20MIL, but it is necessary to understand that Tim Richards became chief designer after Les died, and did a very good job of continuing to produce masters in a style and to a quality consistent with their traditions, albeit with a touch of upward scale creep towards the end.

As I have written elswhere, I have the overriding impression that (to put it a bit bluntly) Higgins himself was a sculptor who turned his hand to making military models, while most of his contemporary competitors seem to have been military enthusiasts who had a go at mastering figures. The difference is subtle but distinct. Les’ figures, apart from the lack of animation, are faultless as miniature representations of humans, but he made a number of howlers in the uniform department which a proper Napoleonic nerd would have avoided – the range initially included some infantry figures which would never have existed. A good example is the British light infantryman (in firing, advancing, kneeling and “at the ready” poses, no less) without shoulder wings, offered as a sort of battalion company LI figure – there was no such thing. These particular figures were suppressed fairly quickly, though – rather irritatingly – the range was also further simplified by dropping the battalion company British line infantry figures (without wings), which definitely did exist, and would have been very useful. Eventually all British line and light infantry figures available had shoulder wings – you just have to leave them unpainted if you don’t want them.

Another quibble is that the Brits wear Waterloo-style Belgic shakoes, yet all have their hair queued in a manner which is more appropriate to 1808 than 1815. And there are a few other niggles – the bayonets are much too fragile, for example – but the figures are lovely. Not quite as lovely as the Marlburian and ECW figures, mind you, but still lovely.

I do have some problems with the Napoleonic cavalry. First off, the horses are awful. Why on earth do these nice little figures have to ride horses from a carousel? Something odd happened here – presumably connected with Higgins’ demise. The cavalry were a later addition to the range and, apart from the initial KGL hussar figure (which is not great, and has a poorly-cast sabre) and maybe the Polish lancer (which is better, though you have to provide your own lance), the riders were all designed and mastered by Richards, I think. The PMD Napoleonic horse is closely related to the rather poor horses from the company’s Colonial range, and looks like it was a rush job, which is a pity, but it is all part of the legacy. I have painted hundreds of the beggars, and I guess I love them in spite of their ugliness!

Richards’ cavalrymen mostly have an odd sideways stance – presumably to simplify the mould seams – but are generally very fine. The French dragoon figures are special favourites of mine. The cuirassiers are also excellent, though there is a conspicuous lack of an officer (you can, however, use the dragoon trumpeter for cuirassiers). It is a little incongrous that the infantry are so static yet the cavalry are performing synchronised galloping reminscent of the Television Toppers (come on – you must have heard of them). No matter.

I have a great many Higgins and PMD figures – wherever they are suitable they provide the bulk of my armies, and they find themselves painted as Italians, Spaniards, and all sorts. I particularly like the gun crews (big chaps, mind you...) and the lovely British command pack. I vaguely remember seeing a photo of masters of a French infantry command set, but can’t remember where, so maybe I imagined it. Whatever, it never appeared. Perhaps they were just lost in the final sunset of the Higgins/PMD wargames ranges as their moulds began to break up and the world moved on to 28mm.

Happily, much of the Higgins/PMD catalogue is available again. Less happily (and my sadness is not helped by the fact that I had a hand in the deed), the Napoleonic range is currently not – it flashed for an instant and then fizzled again. The Spanish concern, NapoleoN Miniatures, bought the masters and moulds of the Napoleonics, with some matchmaking by me, but found that the moulds were in too poor a shape for proper modern production, so they made new moulds. The figures were announced and put on sale. I bought quite a few, but you had to be quick to catch them before NapoleoN entered the twilight period of non-delivery, false promises and general shambles which seems to be the inevitable White Dwarf stage of all failing wargame figure manufacturers.

They did invest a fair amount of time and money in the Higgins project, so I assume the moulds are still around – we can only hope that the enthusiasts who formed NapoleoN will eventually get themselves organised and either sell them or put the figures back in production. It is worth mentioning that NapoleoN were thinking of offering PMD cavalry with an option of PMD horses or their own excellent horses, which would have been a mouth watering prospect.

Like so much of the history of 20mm wargames figures, we are left with a great many what-ifs.

Home Brewed Flags - Spain

One thing I enjoy very much is producing my own flags. There are a number of very useful sites on the Internet which offer excellent free flags, but in many instances these are low-res, or not sufficiently detailed, or incorrect in some way. Whatever, I often choose to go my own way.

These are my own work, developed using PaintShop and a few other tools, designed to be printed on good grade computer printer paper. You should use high-res paper treated on one side only (keeps the bulk down). You can also, of course, print them to whatever size you require to suit different figure scales.

Here's an image giving flags for the 5 battalions in Carlos de Espana's division at Salamanca (July 1812). Nothing here is copyright or borrowed from elsewhere. Of course, in a number of cases no-one (not even local museums) knows exactly what flags were carried, so there is a measure of informed guesswork in here - if you have a more reliable version of any of these, please let me know! [Note that the 2nd Princesa did not carry the same hybrid flag known to have been carried by the 1st Princesa...]


If you click on this image and copy the enlarged version, and print the whole thing 73mm high then the flags will be exactly correct for 1/72 or 20mm figures. The green borders are not part of the flags - they are there so you can see the edges (have you tried cutting out a white flag on a white background? - I have!), and the red line in the border is so you can see which way up they should be - red line at the bottom.

If this stuff is useful please let me know - I have plenty more.

Hooptedoodle #1 - Patapoufs et Filifers

“No,” said Mack. “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. The guy’s writing it, give him a chance to do a little hooptedoodle. Spin up some pretty words maybe, or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up in the story. So if the guy that’s writing it wants hooptedoodle, he ought to put it right first. Then I can skip it if I want to, or maybe go back to it after I know how the story came out.”

John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday

This is not entirely an irrelevance. I have to say in my own defence that the inclusion of this piece comes straight from consideration of what happened to the proportions of the human form, as seen by wargame figure sculptors.

I have in my possession a very battered old copy of André Maurois’ lovely Patapoufs et Filifers. I believe the book is still available in some form or other, but sadly not with the original artwork by Jean Bruller. My copy was given to my mother for Christmas when she was 11, in 1936.

It is a children’s fantasy about two neighbouring nations, the Patapoufs (who are all fat and docile) and the Filifers (who are skinny and irritable), who are irreconcilable. They just can’t get along or agree on anything, and eventually they go to war. I won’t spoil the story by summarising it here, but their armies are very fine. The Patapoufs have small, rotund warships with sausages hanging conveniently so that the warriors can sustain themselves; the Filifers have long, thin tanks and wear pointy helmets. Excellent.

My favourite bit is the tribute to the heroic death of Commandant Tripouf, who died in the field as a result of getting stuck in a trench after overeating. You get the idea. Here is a view of their soldiers.

A few year ago I was going through my spare figures drawer and found a Hinchliffe model of Marshal Ney. He was so obviously a Filifer that I dug out the old Maurois book for reference.

As you will see, the late 1970s dividing of the wargame world into Hinchliffe and Minifigs fans was not entirely unforeseen.

Figures & Figure Scales - take what you can get

Here's a recent picture of my Allied army - that's Anglo/Portuguese/Spanish/Hanoverian etc. They are not quite all present, but it gives an idea of where I've got to. However, I'm getting ahead of myself...

 

So - as I was saying - I plumped for Les Higgins miniatures. I was introduced to them by Archie Alexander, who had The Toytub in Raeburn Place in Edinburgh. The speciality of the shop was really dolls' houses, but he stocked a vast range of wargames figures, which was just as well, since he was all we had locally. I spent many happy Saturday mornings trawling through huge boxes of mixed spares - I would usually go away with two buglers and a horse, or something. Sometimes Archie would get fed up and throw us all out. 

 

The 20mm size was kind of a standard then; the history of this hobby and the figures is documented excellently elsewhere, but I suspect that it was no coincidence that Airfix figures were about this size. Naturally there were things that Higgins did not do, so I used Hinton Hunt for staff figures, for highlanders and Portuguese, for example. I also used the old Garrison 20mm figures, which were pleasing though the range was limited. And the "intermediate" Minifigs (the ones which followed the S-range) were useful, though I didn't care for the oversized hats on the French troops (and still don't) - I used to graft Higgins heads onto Minifigs eaglebearers and gunners with good results. And - maybe best of all - I used Hinchliffe's wonderful 20mm artillery. 

 

Which brings us to a consideration of what the scales mean. I like my armies to be pretty homogeneous in this respect, but it's a hard thing to define. 1/72 scale makes an average man without a hat a little less than an inch tall - 22 to 24 mm is fine for me. This works out well for Higgins, and is OK for Hintons, though they are toward the shorter end of this range. This is a tricky subject - you'd think that, since it's numeric, it would be straightforward, but some figures just look wrong, even though in theory they are the right size. I've read numerous times over the years that it is perfectly acceptable to have figures of different sizes, since men are different sizes anyway. Well, I can't argue with that, but it's also evident that big men don't normally get supplied with big hats and big muskets, and that is the area where the mismatches are noticeable. I regularly see plastic figures which are exactly the right height, but the figures are slender and the hats are small and they just don't fit well with my metal troops.  

 

Which, in turn, brings us to Foy's Third Law: Never mind the millimetres, two figures are the same scale if their hats match. 

 

My armies grew nicely until something fell off the rails in the late 70s or so. For a start, the world was suddenly full of Ents and Wood Elves, but the other thing that happened was that Hinchliffe suddenly started making big skinny 28mm figures, and Minifigs started making big fat chaps like garden gnomes - and, of course, they did very well out of it - the market never looked back. The bad news for me was that some makers I relied on suddenly started making figures which were too big (notably Garrison, though if I'd been familiar with Lamming I would have noticed the same effect), while others (specifically Higgins/PMD) went out of business. 

 

Disaster. The Plan went on hold, I rationalised what I had, fought battles with the armies I had, but the collection was dead, and I was really rather bitter about the whole thing. I spent many years wishing I had just bought in loads of the figures I needed while they were still available - a strategy which is still tempting if you can stand the mountains of unpainted troops - in fact this came very close to getting put forward as another of Foy's Laws, but it would not always be a practical approach. Then came the years from 2005 to now - early retirement, eBay, a sudden (and brief) flowering of new 20mm manufacturers, and I was suddenly in business again. 

 

The armies are shaping up nicely, thank you very much. Over the next few weeks I'll do a short feature on each of the makers I have used. This is not going to be any kind of quality reference job - there are a good number of such things out there already, and some of them are excellent. What I shall do is give my own view of what the figures are like, their strengths and weaknesses (i.e. the things I like about them!), and illustrate them with examples from my collection. There will be some things that you don't see very much, and I'll include a few oddities such as conversions here and there.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To end, here's a picture of part of The Cupboard, which really speaks for itself.

Figures & Figure Scales - choice or accident?

I did think, once, of growing up, but I looked at the grown-ups around me and dropped the idea pretty quickly. I have never looked back.

My armies are based on the Peninsular War. I use 20mm, or "true 25mm", or 1/72 scale figures, and they are almost all white metal. There is a total of some 3500 painted figures now, which is not remarkable - quite humble compared with some of the wondrous collections I see every day on the Internet - but they are working armies, built to a Grand Plan (which has evolved over the years), and - though I delight as much as anyone in the odd rarity and the vintage figures, their prestige score and monetary value are really secondary matters. I'm still feeling my way into this blog business, so thought I would devote a couple of posts (and some thought) to just how and why I finished up with this period, this particular size of figures and the range of manufacturers who have provided them. On another occasion I'll get to things like painting styles and basing, which latter topic is necessarily related to the rules I use. As usual with my wiriting, the point of the journey is as much to do with the passing scenery as with the published destination!

Collecting seems to me to be a strange activity, though of course I can only comment with any authority on my own position. I have always collected stuff. In approximate chronological order, that includes Dinky Toys, cigarette cards of 1950s footballers, unbelievable numbers of books, records-then-cassettes-then-CDs, archtop guitars and, most relevant to the current posting, little model soldiers to fight battles.

In none of these cases have I set out to build a collection. I just get interested in something and obtain a few more, and then start identifying examples it would be nice to have, until - inevitably - the dreaded Completism Sickness sets in and I become uneasy and distracted if I don't have the full set. In the case of wargames figures, it makes some sort of sense, since it is necessary to produce a working representation of something which, in the real world, is (or was) itself a collection.

Foy's Second Law states:

If you can produce a logical justification for your hobby, then it almost certainly is just an obsession.

There you go - I've started with a digression. At least it's out of the way.

In about 1971 I borrowed Don Featherstone's "War Games" from my local public library and I was never the same again. To quote from the introduction to another classic wargames bible, Charlie Wesencraft's "Practical Wargaming", I had an odd feeling that this was something I had been searching for all my life. In a fever of blundering enthusiasm, I bought and mutilated and daubed boxes and boxes of Airfix ACW figures, bought some whacking great sheets of chipboard (which I still use) and had some truly wild battles using Featherstone's rules. I roped in a few mates to play against - it was really most exciting, though the games left too much scope for confusion and argument, and - on the rare occasions when they reached a conclusion - there was frequently a slight feeling of frustration that the rules were so lumpy. But we kept trying to improve the game. Though most of my erstwhile opponents have moved on to more useful ways of spending their lives, I guess I am still trying.

At this point I had never considered the possibility of these plastic armies becoming anything as significant as a collection, they were simply the playing pieces for the wargames. A visiting player smiled at my Stonewall Jackson figure - a crudely painted cowpoke from the Airfix Wagon Train set, and in self-defence I ordered up some metal generals from Hinton Hunt. They were a revelation. The ACW staff figures must have been in relatively low demand - the castings were exquisite, and these remarkable little, jewel-like figures became the showpiece of my armies. That is the point at which the collection probably started. So I ordered up a load of HH zouaves, which eventually arrived, wrapped in newspaper, from Camden Passage, and that is when the reality of collecting hit me. The castings were very rough - it took long, painful hours with needle files to get them into any sort of useable shape, and I took a long time and a lot of care over painting them. The Airfix figures moved to the back of the shelf.

So I was not a life-long military modeller or collector of Britain's soldiers, I simply got fired up in my early 20s by the possibility of producing a miniature simulation of warfare on a tabletop. The smart rows of soldiers were needed for the game, but had a great visual appeal as well. The ACW didn't last long for me, though I do regret not having made more of a go of it. It didn't take much reading to realise that most of the ACW was fought in woods, with troops in open order or dug in behind barricades. Whatever we were doing with Featherstone's rules, it wasn't really the ACW. Around this time I was also an occasional visitor to the South East Scotland Wargames Group, dominated by the formidable George Jeffrey, and it became obvious that Napoleonics were the thing to do. There was a good supply of figures, there was a huge wealth of literature, the uniforms were sumptuous, the tactics of the day were ideal for the tabletop, and there was a nice balance between the capabilities of infantry, cavalry and artillery. I had already been rather put off Ancients (and apologies to all their myriad devotees) because all the games I was involved in ended in a huge grinding match in the centre, which didn't seem to me to be worth all the dice throwing to sort out. I was also, I have to say, put off by the WRG rules of the day, which were frighteningly thorough but also seemed a bit high-handed; if a book of rules tells you exactly what shape of hills you should build, and prescribes which colour of counters you should use to indicate odd attributes of your units, then the phrase "control freak" forms in the back of my mind.

Quick digression on exactly this topic...

Recently I was reading a set of rules, and in the preface the author stated that games should be fun and should be playable (in which he has my wholehearted support), and that much of the pseudo-legal small print of rules sets can be eliminated if the players remember that it is a game, and that any areas of doubt in the rules, if they cannot be settled by reasoned discussion, should be decided by the roll of a dice. Strangely, I felt, he then went on to stipulate that this had to be a decimal dice. Bong! - paradox alert...

Back to the subject in hand.

I experimented with Rene North's little Almark books and some Airfix French, then took the plunge and made Les Higgins my manufacturer of choice. I have included a photo of the oldest identifiable unit I have - the 1st Battalion of the 6eme Leger; the colonel and the hornist are recent Kennington, the unit has been re-based several times, but otherwise the figures and the Humbrol paint job are original 1974. A testament to the protective power of acrylic varnish?

To be continued.